Business Manager - Product & Commercial

Accountabilities: Own the messaging and verification product roadmap across multiple markets, balancing reliability, customer experience, cost efficiency, and speed to market while translating business needs into clear priorities. Define channel selection, fallback, routing, retry, and failover strategies for verification, transactional, and promotional communications, partnering closely with Engineering to deliver the required integrations and operational tooling. Evaluate new messaging channels and capabilities based on market availability, permitted use cases, technical feasibility, and measurable business value. Lead the selection, evaluation, and ongoing management of messaging aggregators, CPaaS providers, and other strategic partners, maintaining supplier scorecards and holding vendors accountable for performance and commercial commitments. Negotiate pricing, volume commitments, service levels, payment terms, and contractual protections in collaboration with vendors, Legal, and relevant internal stakeholders. Build a detailed understanding of messaging economics by market, channel, provider, and use case, identifying opportunities to optimize rates, supplier allocation, routing, and channel selection. Own business outcomes related to delivery success, latency, verification completion, and overall messaging performance, using operational data to identify trends and improvement opportunities. Establish reporting that connects provider performance with customer outcomes, lead escalations and incident response, and drive root-cause analysis and corrective actions when recurring issues arise. Plan supplier capacity and readiness for peak events, major campaigns, and new market launches while reducing supplier concentration risk and maintaining credible alternatives for critical markets. Own messaging spend forecasts and budget performance, tracking cost per delivered message, cost per successful verification, total spend, and volume. Identify and reduce avoidable costs caused by unnecessary retries, duplicate messages, inefficient channel choices, suspicious traffic, and OTP abuse, working with Security and Fraud teams where appropriate. Partner with Legal, Compliance, Security, Fraud, Engineering, Finance, and local market teams to ensure messaging activity meets applicable regulations, consent requirements, sender-registration rules, provider policies, and industry-specific restrictions. Requirements: 5+ years of experience in messaging, CPaaS, communications, or a closely related product, commercial, or hybrid role. Strong practical knowledge of A2P SMS, RCS Business Messaging, and WhatsApp Business, including pricing models, templates and conversations, sender IDs, registration requirements, and related commercial considerations. Demonstrated experience with cost management, vendor negotiations, commercial modeling, and analyzing per-message and per-conversion economics for senior stakeholders. Ability to translate operational and commercial requirements into concise, actionable product and technical requirements that align with broader product and engineering strategies. Deep understanding of messaging performance metrics, including deliverability, latency, verification completion, cost, and provider performance, with the ability to interpret dashboards and turn data into actionable insights. Experience operating across emerging markets in Africa, with an understanding of local regulatory environments and the ability to adapt strategies to different market conditions. Strong cross-functional collaboration skills, with experience aligning internal teams, external partners, and senior executives around shared objectives. Excellent analytical, negotiation, communication, and stakeholder-management abilities, combined with strong commercial judgment and ownership. Experience in highly regulated industries is an advantage. Existing relationships with regional communications vendors across Africa are a plus. Familiarity with API documentation, webhooks, integration constraints, and technical dependencies is beneficial. Experience with additional communication channels and tools such as email, push, in-app messaging, USSD, chatbots, conversational AI, or CDPs is a plus. Experience designing or operating multi-vendor routing environments across communications providers is highly desirable. Benefits: Opportunity to own the product and commercial direction of a critical messaging and verification ecosystem across multiple international markets. High-impact role with direct influence on customer experience, conversion, operational efficiency, and infrastructure costs. Cross-functional exposure spanning Product, Engineering, Commercial, Operations, Finance, Security, Fraud, Legal, Compliance, and external technology partners. Opportunity to work with emerging communications technologies, including SMS, RCS, WhatsApp Business, voice, verification, and conversational solutions. Significant ownership over vendor strategy, commercial negotiations, routing, deliverability, and cost optimization. Exposure to fast-moving emerging markets, including diverse operational and regulatory environments across Africa. Remote-friendly opportunity with the flexibility associated with a distributed working environment. Opportunity to contribute to a rapidly evolving technology and communications ecosystem where operational performance has a direct business impact.